I like iOS, but not Android. Let me explain why.
I personally love Linux, Unix philosophy (I'm even sometimes an old beardy zealot about POSIX standards and the old way), and inherent customization possibilities.
On the other hand, I don't want to manage my phone like a desktop or laptop computer, or a server because of a plethora of reasons. First, user interface is not very suitable for that. Second, there's a lot more finicky things to manage. Last but not the least, that management task is continuous.
iOS takes all of these away. Complete backups are built-in (I know android has it, but I don't know how bulletproof is this). Defaults are sensible. Settings do not change spontaneously. OS behavior doesn't change drastically from device to device (Every android vendor tunes their OS and background process policy differently, creating a lot of WTH moments and more finicky management tasks). Updates are not slowed down by the vendor, the operator, the distributor and today's weather.
While iOS is a pretty strict walled garden, devices are set-up and forget. Even you forget that you have an iOS device, because you use it without thinking.
Radio security, isolation and its reasonable and unreasonable parts are discussed here extensively. As a HAM radio operator, I can only say that, radios can do wreak a lot of havoc even with informed tinkering, without any bad intentions. If you take a relatively cheap SDR and listen to your neighborhood spectrum (just see the traffic, not decode anything) your jaw will drop. It's a very crowded up there, and there's a lot of non-public traffic.
Another stuff about custom ROMs and Stock ROMs is SIM services. Yes, many of the SIM menus just sit here unused, but there are useful ones like mobile e-signatures. I carry my e-sig with my phone, in my SIM. So using it requires a verified and official software stack. As far as my experience goes, no custom ROMs run these services (intentionally or unintentionally).
I manage my family's Android phones, and I personally use an iPhone. As far as I can see, it's much easier to leave an iOS device on its terms and it'll fare better.
Feel free to discuss, counter or just burn this comment down. :)
Not to burn you down, but to burn Android down: no, Android does not allow you to take complete backups. Let alone "built-in". The only backups that are made are forced to Google cloud and only backs-up apps that where downloaded through Google Play and app settings for Google stuff. It is an extremely limiting almost non-backup if you're used to going around Google. When switching phones it's still a process of hours / days to get everything set-up the way you had it on a previous phone. Especially if it was rooted.
The only way I know to take a full backup image of an Android phone involves unlocking (not possible on all phones), rooting (not possible on all phones), installing Nandroid and pulling an image over USB. To restore to a "fresh" phone, you need to go through all of those steps again.
This would take hours to weeks depending on who does it and the puzzle your phone manufacturer sets up for you to unlock your phone.
This to me is one of the many absolutely mind-blowing facts about the trash Android OS (disclaimer: I'm still an Android user, because I can't accept a phone without a physical keyboard. Never used Apple products in my life).
Want to wipe your phone and restore an image after you travel into a "spy-state"? Nope. You simply can't with an Android phone.
You know a phone that was able to do this out of the box? My 2013 Blackberry Passport. No rooting or fiddling around required. Just install a desktop app, plug the phone into USB and press "full system backup".
I run a custom honescreen: it's just another Android app! And yet everytime I have to set that back up again manually.
I have very little trust in Google so I don't want to backup to google cloud (I just researched and it seems they do provide end to end backup encryption without Google having the key anywhere since Android 9, is that really the case now?)
Things like the set of apps, settings (both app and system level), game progress, the set of open tabs, etc can be backed up, and IOS is even able to restore old app versions specified in the backup by downloading them from the store.
All that said, both IOS backup options are more comprehensive than the built-in android options.
iOS even restores your open applications and task manager state when you restore from the backup. Even more so, theoretically, it can restore every apps state at the point of backing up. It's a feature ported from macOS.
There is no way Apple is going to let 3rd party could providers do backups directly. I doubt exposing the iPhone as a USB device over the internet with a VM running iTunes would work efficiently.
From my experience this is completely false. I just switched from Galaxy S8 to S20, and I transferred everything and had the new phone setup exactly like the old one, with all apps (that would allow it, LINE wouldn't) and even ringtones and text tones set how I had them in about 20 minutes.
Can't you enable developer mode, open a terminal and just run `dd`?
1) You don't want to risk dumping a mounted filesystem because of inconsistencies
2) Good luck getting the right device - in the end it's devicemapper all the way down with a lot of layers (ecryptfs, sdcardfs, bind mounts, ...) stacked between your shell and the device.
3) Unrooted phones don't allow access to raw Unix devices
4) You can't restore these backups anywhere if your phone (like almost all, I think it's a Netflix requirement) uses hardware key storage - simply because the key is in the secure element of your phone. Rooting a Samsung phone kills the HSM and switches over to software key management though.
5) Assuming encryption keys don't get in your way, you can only restore the dump on exactly the same model and firmware of device you have, because every manufacturer does stuff slightly different.
To root "well made" phones, you need to unlock the bootloader, and this will erase the data on the device, to prevent data theft or compromise...
It's a bit messier if your data also lives on an internalized sd card.
Android has had full system backup capabilities through `adb backup` for years. It does not require removing carrier locks or rooting and has been available since Android 2.x iirc.
I've used this to transfer all of my apps, app settings, and system settings between all of my Android phones:
Nexus One -> Galaxy Nexus -> Note 3 -> Galaxy S6 -> Galaxy S8 -> Galaxy S9 -> Galaxy S10 -> Z Fold 2, all with one continuous chain of backup and restores via `adb backup` and `adb restore`.
These restores sometimes even worked flawlessly across different Android OS versions! Sometimes this has caused a lot of weird issues wrt system settings, so admittedly this process can be quite buggy.
Apparently this is false, because apps can "opt out" of ADB backup and many do (see other comments), furthermore it doesn't backup the entire phone, but only the system image (partly). Does it backup the root state of the phone? Nope. Does it backup the restore partition of the phone? Nope. Making it a "maybe full system backup but not full system image backup that is kind of buggy". In other words, like I wrote earlier: not a -full- system backup at all.
I was specifically talking about effortlessly backing up and restoring a full system image. Blackberry OS10 style: plug in phone, press "backup system image" and get a carbon copy of EVERYTHING that runs on the phone that can be restored to a new or existing phone with 1 click. Your post confirms that this is not possible in Android: using ADB is not "effortlessly" and it's not a full system image backup.
Even if I would backup and restore from and to the exact same rooted phone (that's all I'm asking), the restored backup would not be the same as whatever was on the phone when the ADB backup was pulled. Nandroid can do this, in theory, with a lot of hassle (but not on my phone, because TWRP for my phone doesn't support decryption of the system partition).
They’re not. Backups are built-in but they’re not complete. For example google Authenticator data is not backed up. Microsoft Authenticator can be backed up, but you need to go through a few extra steps (and have a Microsoft account). Other secrets are not included either - my banks PhotoTAN app doesn’t store any credentials etc. There are reasons why this is so, but it’s really important to handle if you use your phone for 2FA.
AFAIK, applications allow their secrets to be backed up or not, and I'm not mad that my 2FA keys are no backed up and shipped overseas. I keep another copy of my 2FA codes in another application, so it's not a very big problem from my PoV, though.
It's not a problem if you took measures to make sure you have a copy. It's a problem if you just take "full backups" for granted until you figure out that some things don't get included in "full".
Get Keepass2Android, and it'll track TOTPs just fine. Throw Syncthing on their and you can securely get those to any device you own without involving Google.
You mention setup & forget, that's how probably 98-99% of Android phones operate. Same for me, all the people and family I know. Initial install&setup after purchase, and then just running 1-click updates if one chooses to. After 3-4 years, switch to another one.
Hardware is +-same, what differences there are are invisible to user (apart from basic things like dual sims and memory card slots, which Apple lacks desperately... and bigger zoom for photos). Some like the smooth Apple UI, some feel they have the same on Android, most don't care. Some care about privacy which Apple seems to be the champion, most of the world simply doesn't care and isn't even aware. Some realize privacy is an illusion even with Apple, if you are 95% of the world that lives outside USA, various 3-letter agencies can do whatever they want and abuse your data in numerous ways without any recourse.
Its all relative, the most important is if one is happy with whatever one has and doesn't have unrealistic expectations.
That sums it pretty well. I don't have anything to counter, but wanted to just say thanks for the frank comment and another perspective.
No Firefox on iOS, hence useless.
My impression is that the Firefox shell offered is still able to provide the various anti-tracking privacy features that many would point to Firefox for, and the variety of browser shells available should mean that you'd be able to find a UI to your liking if Safari's isn't.
At that point, the only thing I can see missing is a non-webkit engine. I get that that's an annoyance and definitely on the same anti-competitive level as 00s era IE, but by and large web developers account for it and it works acceptably. As much as I'd need it to for mobile browsing.
Would just be interested to know if there's something more I'm missing.
No plugins/add-ons effectively.
Of course, nowadays the assets of apps have to be part of the deployable, itself. So it's common to run localhost web server.
On the other hand, it's useless for creation. But that's fine, the trade offs are worth it in my opinion. I have dedicated hardware running Linux/Windows for that purpose.
So much for not changing settings by themselves :)
If that isn’t what you want to happen, you go to the Settings app and turn off those toggles. (But I wish they would have a matching statement on screen that clarifies their changes are permanent until you change them again.)
Temporary toggles being in the control center is great. Most of the time that I quickly disconnect from WiFi or Bluetooth, it’s to solve some immediate, temporary issue.
The settings aren’t “changing themselves” — they’re doing what you asked them to do. The written message tells you what you asked them to do in order to teach new users what these buttons do.
